Books in Review

Into the Wild

Civilization and Wilderness

Into the Wild. By Jon Krakauer. Villard. 207
pp. $22.

Reviewed by John P. Sisk

Jon Krakauer has written a thoroughly familiar American story. Its
central figure, a recent college graduate named Chris McCandless, is
spiritually ill at ease in his well-to-do East Coast bourgeois home and
strikes out on his own, impelled by a need to make a new life for
himself.

In a haphazard way he sees a good deal of the Southwest, canoes down the
Grand Canyon to Mexico, wanders about the Pacific coast and into
Montana. Along the way he works in an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas,
fries hamburgers for McDonald's, and works on a harvest crew. Determined
to live authentically on the edge, he makes his way to Alaska where,
provisioned with ten pounds of rice and a collection of his favorite
paperbacks, he establishes himself north of Mt. McKinley in an abandoned
Fairbanks city bus and proceeds to live off the land, supplementing his
rice with moose meat, small game, and berries. In four months he is dead
of starvation and the poisoning effect of wild potato seeds.

But what really makes this well- written book, which began as an article
in Outside magazine, is the story of how Krakauer got it. He
had the advantage of Chris' letters to friends, as well as his journals
and the many photographs that were found with the body in the abandoned
bus. Interviews with Chris' parents and sister and the people with whom
he came into contact along the way have made possible a skillful
reconstruction of the young man's effort to reinvent his life.

Important too is the extent to which the author's own experience in the
Alaskan wild anticipated that of his subject. Over a twenty-year period
he had gotten to know the country well as carpenter, fisherman,
journalist, and occasionally as an imperilled mountain climber. He is in
a position to recognize that Chris' naive idealism was greatly
responsible for the mistakes that led to his death, but he knows too
that a dismissive off-the-rack psychoanalysis of the impulse to live
dangerously in the wild can miss something important. That insight is
not only good for the story itself but can encourage readers to confront
issues we are inclined to sentimentalize.

One of the most conspicuous of these issues is the all too familiar
identification of civilization as a perverse system of restrictions
aimed at denying the individual an environment in which he can achieve
the fulfillment that is his birthright. One of Chris' friends recalls
how often the young man's face "would darken with anger and he'd
fulminate about his parents or politicians or the endemic idiocy of
mainstream American life." For many of us this is the way sensitive
young idealists ought to sound, and when they go boldly into the
wilderness they ought to carry in their backpacks (as Chris did)
Thoreau, Jack London, and Tolstoy. Doing so, they give comfort to the
laggard rest of us, who are too inclined to live with our frustrations
as comfortably as we can and too prudently content to experience
wilderness as mere recreation.

Chris writes to a friend: "You must lose your inclination for a
monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will
first appear to you to be crazy." Like so many of our antinomian culture
heroes, including Huckleberry Finn and of course Thoreau, he makes us
uneasily aware of our attachment to money and the enslaving comforts it
makes possible. Early in his Western tour he burns $123 in a morally mandated
act of civil disobedience. According to his mother, even as a teenager he had
been a Tolstoyan who "believed that wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently
evil." Indeed, his attitude towards money and its comforts sometimes suggests
the ascesis that marked those athletes of God who, as Helen Waddell tells us so
memorably in The Desert Fathers, were unable to resist the dangerous
enchantments of the north African desert. Appropriately enough, then, when
Krakauer considers the young man's farewell picture of himself we get this:
"Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God."

There is an aesthetic appeal in this image, as if it memorizes the poem
of a life. When he writes to a friend, contrasting the deep peace of the
wild with the discontent bred by cities, he claims that "It is enough
that I am surrounded with beauty." On a piece of plywood inside the
abandoned bus in which he died he identifies himself as "an extremist,
an aesthetic voyager." It is an identification that goes with his
passion for aloneness and his avoidance of enduring human commitments,
whether to family or to the friends who help him get to Alaska. His
proper affiliate is an avant-garde artist like the impressionist painter
Paul Gauguin, for whom Tahiti was a necessary escape from his family and
the contaminating commitments of bourgeois Europe. Alaska was Chris'
Tahiti as Walden was Thoreau's. There he found that reality itself
resists the attempt to separate the aesthetic elements of life from the
ethical and the mundane.

If such "aesthetic idealists" as Gauguin and Thoreau taught us the
dangerous-and in Chris' case deadly-separation of the aesthetic life,
they also taught us to believe that only in the wild can a man be free
from the aesthetic deadening of the civilized world. Young Chris found
plenty of encouragement for his aesthetic bias against civilization. But
after one hundred days in the wild, with death from starvation looming,
he writes in his journal that he is "too weak to walk out, have
literally been trapped in the wild." At this point we survivors might
say that he has discovered the hard way that the experience of the wild
may only be an indulgence that civilization subsidizes as part of its
ongoing effort to define and refine itself against the counter efforts
of the wild to have it all.